Programmer, Analyst, Learner, Leader, Gamer

Yeah yeah, call me indecisive. Now that I’m officially a manager within a global, public corporation… I think having a blog titled “O RLY, YA RLY, NO WAIH” isn’t very professional. I’ll still keep the blog’s original intention in place, this is my mental break place where I collect my thoughts. It will continue to be witty, crazy, and filled with gaming stuff. I just wanted to maintain a pseudo professional ring to it.

With the following announcement, it’s official. I’m now the manager of ESP “North”. I will have a few developers, QA, and technical support staff working for me maintaining the current (soon to be legacy) applications for ESP, while the veteran developers work on re-writing the application as a C# / ASP.Net / Web service based application.

Just another thing that is adding to my busy schedule as I am currently wading through 23 resumes that are growing every 15 minutes or so as more resumes come in from the job posts I made. If you are interested, please look for my post on Portland Craig’s List.

It is with much regret that Mark Heins is announcing Victor Laurence is leaving the Comply Plus Development Team. Conversely it is with much fanfare that I am announcing Victor as the Manager of the ESP North Development Team. Of course this will be a smooth transition

 

ESP is in Mountain View California and can be found on the web at http://esp-net.com/. ESP was acquired by IHS the same day as Dolphin and is one of the organizations in the Environment Domain. ESP currently has 6 Software Developers and a few colleagues in QA and Tech Support. We are currently seeking 2 Software Developers and at least 1 QA and 1 Tech Support Engineer to work alongside Victor in our Lake Oswego office. We will be working on existing ESP products, as well as, the future roadmap. Victor will work closely with the existing team in Mountain View which is managed by Randy Chandrupatla on the Software Development side and Tony Bamberger managing QA and Tech Support. This approach will provide good coverage and cross-training for this extensive code base and allow the developers at both locations to create similar look and feel products for the entire product offering in the Environment Domain.

 

Please join me in congratulating and supporting Victor.

Between the Warhammer Beta, college, my car being broken into, changing job roles, possibly other opportunities, house hunting, preparing out household budget, moving finances, keeping my head screwed on, meeting with mortgage lenders to get pre-approved for a future home purchase, finding the PERFECT place, signing paperwork, working with a homeowner/landlord who’s not even in town, dealing with getting new teeth put in my mouth after fracturing two of them, and now packing and preparing to move by the 15th starting this weekend (wears me out just saying all that)…

Let’s just say I’ve been busy. More details forthcoming as I find the time to post.

Today I was asked to move (or at least start the transition) onto the development team for our newest flagship product which is going to unify all of our existing products into one suite. I was intially asked to fulfill a simple Flex developer role and one 30 minute conversation later, I had pitched a completely different role. Here is the pitch I gave the manager of the team after our conversation.

Victor’s position on the <FLASHSHIP-PRODUCT> team would leverage his well rounded knowledge to fill a very specific and needed role. Working as part of the <FLASHSHIP-PRODUCT> software development team, his duties would include the following.

He will contribute to the development of the product as a front-end Flex designer/developer, but he will also have a major focus on documenting the development processes. He will do so by working with <FLASHSHIP-PRODUCT-MANAGER> and other stakeholders to better establish project goals, specifications, budget and timelines. This would involve collaboration with various business units, then using that understanding of business operations to help build solutions to meet the department’s internal information needs as well as the customer needs. He will analyze business processes, identifying causes of problems and making recommendations for process and design improvements. He will use his knowledge across a spectrum of technologies to determine the best solutions to design problems. He will also work to establish testing procedures to ensure the application is thoroughly tested during development and prior to release.

EDIT: This was the response.

Thanks Victor.  I appreciate the effort and enthusiasm for writing that up.  I should be able to make it pretty much a done deal.  I’ll send <VP-OF-THE-DIVISION> a quick email to get confirmation.

Yet another week of this hellish session is complete. I’m not really struggling on he classes anymore, but they still are quite time consuming. I particularly like how at this point, Accounting is starting to make sense and the Structured Analysis and Design class is becoming easier as well. I think Accounting is making more sense because it’s getting more logical and less memorization. Structured Analysis is getting easier because I’m more… familiar with the later steps in the structured design process. Most of the time at previous employers (and current one included) we skipped the first couple of steps so those steps were most foreign to me. The information security class is still brain dead easy, although it’s giving me all kinds of crazy ideas on what I can do to help make our office more secure.

Yesterday Scott sent out an email that’s really got my grey matter flowing. It is a 111 page PDF document (WITH NO BOOKMARKS, ARG!!!!) that illustrates and describes the core values and core competencies of IHS and how they line up with the 5 separate paths (not including management path) of IHS. Software Quality Assurance, Technical, Development, Program Management, and finally Business Solutions. I’m obviously on the Software Engineer path right now, but my desire is to be on the Business Solutions path. Actually, technically right now I’m on none of the paths, but hopefully that’s going to be fixed soon.

The nice thing about this document is that I have not only a visual picture of the path (Business Solutions Architect, Senior Business Solutions Architect, Principle Business Solutions Architect, and Executive Business Solutions Architect), but clear job descriptions and the core competencies IHS views that play a role in job performance / reviews. An extra bonus is that it gives me even MORE excuse to talk to my colleges about it and share my career goals openly while telling them WHY I’m interested in that path even more so than the engineering path. I had a very long conversation wtih Don and he agreed with me that from my passions, education, and experience that the Business Solutions Path is there I should be going.

NOTE to Self: change the Dolphin Software category it IHS…

I am pretty well versed in RFID technology. At PREM (my last employer), we were thinking about implementing RFID for the purpose of building equipment tracking and maintenance tracking. We never implemented it due to cost with little time saved based on how we wanted to implement it, but I learned a lot about how RFID works and the value vs cost of them. So when I was asked to join a task team to identify solutions for RFID for a client at my current employer, I found this comprehensive article detailing the analytical value and ROI of RFID technology: http://www.teradata.com/t/pdf.aspx?a=83673&b=140892.

RFID solutions are not simple. They are VERY hard to implement, with a high start up cost and high upkeep cost (RFID tags 5-10 cents per tag, Barcode label less than 1 cent per label). From a physical and process standpoint they can be an operational challenge, but also from a software standpoint they can be equally complicated to implement well. The value in an RFID implementation is that they are fast and accurate in large volumes and/or frequency of scanning. The best RFID solutions are automated and don’t even require human intervention for scanning because they leverage the longer range RFID tags. Even when using short range tags which require human intervention for scanning, imagine walking into a room with 5,000 RFID tags and scanning them all in about 30 seconds (166 scans a second, some scanners are as fast as 400 scans a second). Let’s say there were 300 chemicals in the room, that’s still 2 seconds to scan all of them. Then you move on to the next room.

While they are expensive to implement and upkeep, the cost saving is in the time. From a software standpoint, you need a solution that will either POST-process all scans or buffer the scans and handle them one at a time. Ideally again since RFID is all about speed, you would want to do a lot of scanning all at once, then reconcile the scans later handling any special cases and errors all at once instead of piecemeal between scans or even scan batches. If you are slowed down by the interface of your scanning solution then it outweighs the benefits of RFID implementation in the first place.

The best RFID solution I can see is one that scans and collects data, then post scanning interfaces with a machine, processes the data, then intelligently based on pre-setup rules to handle exceptions. This is assuming that you don’t want to on the fly use their RFID tags to store information in the tag like current quantity, current location, etc, information that would be valuable to the scanning process. Who knows maybe as containers move within their facility, maybe they intend on updating the RFID tag to store actual transaction information. Of course I’m just going out on the limb of all the things you can do with RFID.

In the end, the value of RFID is all about speed. Speed, speed, and ummm speed. As long as the solution is fast and efficient, it outweighs the upfront cost of implementation and the maintenance cost of the tags / encoding devices.

I’ve been busy the last few months. This little bit of self reflection will give you some insight into what I’ve been going through with recently, particularly within the last few weeks.

My journey into leadership began many years ago when I was the sole IT manager and programmer at a small commercial real-estate management firm. I was coached by the President on ways to improve myself as a leader. I was challenged to find better ways of doing business and how to communicate those changes to others. This journey expanded when I was encourage to pick up the leadership torch as a volunteer leadership position in an online community of over 100 individuals. This expanded later when I left that community and again was pulled (almost reluctantly) into another organization which is now around those same numbers. Right now I hold a second volunteer position that involves leading communications and facilitating change goals for a community of thousands of people, compiling feedback, and delivering reports to key players in a much larger organization. Over the years people have described my leadership style as democratic, pragmatic, and visionary. How did I develop such strong leadership skills in such a small amount of time?

The key factor that has been advantageous to my journey has been RAPIDLY growing environments. The real-estate management firm was constantly in a state of change. During my time with them they grew to a handful of people to over 65 people. In all of my volunteer leadership positions, they have taken place in an even more rapidly changing environment growing from a handful of people to well over 100. My exposure to rapidly changing environments has allowed me to learn how to properly lead change. Furthermore, I’ve had the power to experiment with various techniques of leadership (learned through formal education as well as self study) with little to no fear of “ruining a good thing”, especially with my volunteer leadership positions.

The more I learn about leadership, the more I realize that the average person doesn’t understand the difference between management and leadership. The more I learn about leadership, the more I realize that this is a product of history and the way individuals in business were trained to manage, and how individuals have learned what “managers” are like. When two organizations come together, one who understands management and the other than understands leadership, a serious challenge presents itself. This challenge is one that we will face going forward. 

P.S. Yes, I fell off my wight loss plan. I’m still struggling with a lack of a real schedule in my life.

My first Dolphin Holiday party was on Friday and it was a blast. Sophisticated, but fun and plenty of “family belonging” with the Dolphin team. I think the slideshow was the best part of the whole evening and the awards cerimony. It was VERY well done and I’m really happy with some of the people who got awards.

Overall it was a great weekend topped off with a weather challenging weekend for Kerrie at Saturday market. The weekend ended with me doing apprently horrible on my statistics test. If I really focus hard I can still pull off an A in the class. If I get a B, oh well. I’ll still have a super sexy grade point average. 15 A’s so far and 1 B is not anything to scoff at.